Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie
If it is still the purpose of the Imperial government to prosecute relentless and indiscriminate warfare against vessels of commerce by the use of U-boats without regard to what the Government of the United States must consider the sacred and indisputable rules of international law and universally recognized dictates of humanity, the Government of the United States is at last forced to the conclusion that there is but one course it can pursue. Unless the Imperial Government should now immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of U-boat warfare against passenger and freight carrying vessels, the Government of the United States can have no other choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the German empire altogether.
German alarm at Wilson’s note was very great. Up to that point, the American president had admitted that, properly conducted, submarine attacks on commerce were legitimate acts of war. Now Wilson was threatening to sever relations; war was the next step. The issue was discussed in Berlin in its starkest terms: could Germany achieve victory by unrestricted submarine warfare even if the United States entered the war, before U.S. military forces could be organized and brought to bear? In these discussions, Bethmann-Hollweg and Jagow continued to insist on the absolute necessity of preventing a break. The chancellor repeated what he had said before: America’s entry would mean Finis Germaniae. Falkenhayn, now needing help from the navy as his attack on Verdun was failing, pressed for intensification of the U-boat war. But now Holtzendorff again switched sides. Unwilling to provoke war with America, the Chief of the Naval Staff opposed Falkenhayn and declared that Germany was more likely to secure a good peace by not pressing on with intensified submarine warfare. Admiral Eduard von Capelle, Tirpitz’s successor as minister of the navy, also advised against further provoking the American government. In addition, Capelle said that even if prize law restrictions were reimposed on submarine warfare, the toll on Allied shipping need not be much reduced; he estimated that U-boats still could sink 160,000 tons per month.
The decision fell on the kaiser. Although William fretted at Wilson’s “impertinence,” he sided with the chancellor and canceled intensified U-boat warfare. On April 24, he instructed Holtzendorff to issue a command that “until further orders, U-boats may only act against commerce in accordance with Prize Regulations.” Once again, U-boats were ordered not to destroy any ship, even an enemy vessel, without first examining its papers and ensuring the safety of the crew. The only exception allowed would come from an attempt by a ship “to escape or offer resistance.” Admiral Scheer, now the Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet, scornfully refused to accept this new strategy. Following the example set by Pohl the previous autumn, Scheer on April 25 recalled to port all High Seas Fleet U-boats. He informed the Naval Staff that he had terminated the campaign, much as he regretted “the cessation of the most effective form of attack on England’s economic position . . . [which] might have had decisive effect on the war’s outcome.” His decision was influenced by Commodore Bauer, who in March had made a voyage in U-67 to study conditions for himself and had concluded that it was too dangerous for U-boats to operate in the waters around England in accordance with prize law. Unfortunately, Scheer’s recall signal, which ended the second submarine campaign against merchant shipping, caught three High Seas Fleet U-boats still at sea, none of which received the wireless recall message; between April 27 and May 8, they sank eight merchant vessels grossing 26,000 tons. The last of these was the 13,370-ton liner Cymric, bound for America and torpedoed without warning off the Irish coast with the loss of five lives. The Cymric was the thirty-seventh passenger liner sunk by U-boats since the loss of Lusitania and the fourth passenger liner sunk during the second offensive. The captain of the U-boat that sank the Cymric was Walther Schwieger, who had torpedoed Lusitania and Hesperian.
In recalling his submarines, Scheer had a political as well as a military purpose. Submarine warfare was overwhelmingly popular with the Ger-man people, and the admiral hoped that his action would force Bethmann-Hollweg—the principal opponent of unrestricted warfare against merchant shipping—to resign in the face of a storm of public indignation. When a popular uproar failed to arise, Scheer, disappointed, reassigned his U-boats to their role from early in the war: attacking enemy warships in order to whittle down the numerical superiority of the Grand Fleet. To help this plan succeed, Reinhard Scheer decided to risk a North Sea surface action between the dreadnoughts of the High Seas Fleet and the British Grand Fleet.
The wheel of German naval strategy had come full circle.
CHAPTER 30 The Eve of Jutland
For weeks, little Hugo von Pohl, the Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet, had been struggling with cancer of the liver, and on January 8, 1916, he was taken from his flagship, Friedrich der Grosse, to a hospital in Berlin. Most officers in the fleet doubted that he would return and, aside from personal considerations, were glad to see him go. Pohl’s eleven months in command of the fleet had been marked by a monumental and almost unbroken passivity. Five times, the battle fleet had gone to sea, but never more than 120 miles from Wilhelmshaven and never into any situation where there was serious danger of encountering the British. Meanwhile, the ships of the German battle squadrons had followed a dreary schedule: a week on patrol inside the minefields of the Bight; another week anchored, but ready for battle in Schillig roads; then passing through the Kiel Canal to practice gunnery in Kiel Bay; and then two weeks or more tied up to Wilhelmshaven quays so that their men could walk the streets, drink beer in the saloons, and sleep in redbrick barracks ashore. Tirpitz might rage that the sharp weapon he had forged was being allowed to rust, but Pohl stoutly maintained that, as the kaiser had instructed him not to risk the fleet, he was doing his duty. On January 18, the moribund Pohl was succeeded by Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer; on February 23, Pohl died.
Scheer’s appointment delighted the navy. He was fifty-three—four years younger than Jellicoe—a man of middle height, with piercing black eyes, closely trimmed hair, high cheekbones, a black mustache, and sometimes a small, tufted goatee. His thirty-eight-year career epitomized that of the professional naval officers rising through the ranks of the young German navy. Now at the top, in supreme command of Germany’s forces at sea, Scheer was alert, aggressive, and confident, a strategist and tactician who could plan a campaign and then conduct a battle. “We knew that Scheer was made up of different stuff from Pohl,” said Ernst von Weizsäcker, his Flag Lieutenant at Jutland. “There were many stories of his exploits as a young lieutenant. His old friends had given him the odd nickname Bobschiess [Shooting Bob] on account . . . of his likeness to his fox terrier which he was fond of provoking to bite his friends’ trousers.” Now, as Commander-in-Chief, Scheer wished and intended to attack his country’s enemies with every weapon at his disposal.
Reinhard Scheer rose from the same middle-class background that produced the Imperial German Navy’s other Great War senior admirals: Tirpitz, Hipper, Ingenohl, Müller, and Pohl. A schoolmaster’s son from Hanau, on the river Main, Scheer entered the navy at fifteen without financial support or social connections. His training began on the sailing frigate Niobe where, in daylight and at night, Scheer and his fellow cadets scampered up the masts and crawled out on the yards. He served on the armored frigate Friedrich Karl and then on the armored corvette Hertha, which, circling the world, introduced Scheer to Melbourne, Yokohama, Shanghai, Kobe, and Nagasaki. He had two tours of duty with the German East Africa Cruiser Squadron; during the first of these, he befriended Lieutenant Henning von Holtzendorff and, a few years later, he served under Holtzendorff in the cruiser Prinzess Wilhelm on a voyage to the Far East. Between his African tours, Scheer spent four years at technical schools ashore, studying torpedo technology and warfare; thereafter, during his second East Africa tour, he was torpedo officer in the light cruiser Sophie. Returning to Germany, he became an instructor at the Torpedo Research Command in Kiel.
Scheer’s growing reputation brought him into contact with Admiral von Tir
Scheer was greatly admired by those who worked with him and for him. Weizsacker recalled that the admiral “was of cheerful disposition, had a quick mind and was without any pretensions. His optimistic nature always recovered quickly from a setback.” Captain Adolf von Trotha, Scheer’s Chief of Staff, had a similar view:
One could not find a better comrade. He never stood on ceremony with young officers. But he was impatient and always had to act quickly. He would expect his staff to have the plans and orders for an operation worked out exactly to the last detail, and then he would come on the bridge and turn everything upside down. He was a commander of instinct and instant decision who liked to have all options presented to him and then as often as not chose a course of action no one had previously considered. In action he was absolutely cool and clear. Jutland showed his great gifts and a man like that must be allowed to drive his subordinates mad.
Scheer, like Tirpitz, was a forceful advocate of unrestricted submarine warfare, but, also like Tirpitz, he believed that submarine warfare alone would not defeat Great Britain. Certain—again, like Tirpitz—that German ships were qualitatively superior to British ships and that German officers and men were equal to their British opponents, Scheer was determined to go on the offensive. In February, Scheer conferred in Berlin with Admiral von Holtzendorff and the two men agreed to attempt to break the stranglehold of the British blockade at sea. Scheer’s staff in Wilhelmshaven produced a document titled “Guiding Principles for Sea Warfare in the North Sea.” The first principle was acceptance of the continuing fact that the unfavorable ratio of numbers of ships ruled out a decisive, all-out battle with the Grand Fleet. The second was that, within this framework, constant pressure should be exerted on the British fleet to force it to send out some of its forces to respond to German attacks. The third was that in these offensive operations, the German navy should use every weapon available: airship and submarine operations were to be combined with operations by the High Seas Fleet in deep offensive thrusts into the North Sea.
On February 23, the kaiser, accompanied by Tirpitz, Holtzendorff, and Prince Henry, arrived in a snowstorm in Wilhelmshaven to listen as Scheer personally presented these plans to the sovereign. In the wardroom of Friedrich der Grosse, Scheer described to the emperor his plans to use his battle cruisers and light forces to draw the British piecemeal out of their bases. These operations, in effect a resumption of Hipper’s earlier bombardments of English coastal towns, would constitute such an insult that the British navy must respond. And when the first British squadrons came out, the High Seas Fleet would be there. William listened, overcame his qualms, and agreed.
In fact, a small, preliminary offensive operation had taken place even before the kaiser’s approval had been given. On February 10, German destroyers made a night sweep beyond the Dogger Bank, where they fell upon a group of British minesweepers and sank one of them. This sortie brought additional profit when Tyrwhitt’s flagship, the famous light cruiser Arethusa, returning to Harwich, struck a German mine, parted a line while being towed, and eventually went on a shoal and broke in half. Scheer’s first major effort with the entire High Seas Fleet came three weeks later when he attempted a trap of British forces in the southern North Sea. On March 5, he took the fleet to a position off Texel at the mouth of the Zuider Zee, the farthest south the German battle fleet would venture during the war. Unfortunately, snow, hail, restricted visibility, and heavy seas forced Scheer to order the fleet home before any contact was possible.
The British then made an offensive thrust of their own. Nightly zeppelin raids on London and other cities had prodded the Admiralty to attack the airship bases. On March 25, five seaplanes flying from the carrier Vindex, a converted merchant ship, attempted to bomb a zeppelin shed at Hoyer on the Schleswig coast. Tyrwhitt with five light cruisers and eighteen destroyers escorted Vindex while Beatty cruised forty-five miles away. The weather was bitterly cold, snow was falling, and the wind was rising to gale force. The result was a British fiasco: three seaplanes, launched forty miles offshore, developed engine trouble and came down in German territory, where their crews were captured. A fourth pilot discovered that there was no zeppelin shed at Hoyer and bombed what he said was a factory. The fifth pilot discovered an actual zeppelin shed farther inland at Tondern, but when he dived to attack, his bomb-release cable jammed. Meanwhile, at sea, German destroyers arrived and in a confused fight in a snowstorm, the British destroyer Laverock rammed her sister Medusa, which later had to be abandoned. Tyrwhitt’s new flagship, the light cruiser Cleopatra, then rammed the German destroyer G-194, cutting her in half, but then herself was rammed by the British light cruiser Undaunted. A larger British disaster was avoided only when Scheer, who had ordered his battle fleet to sea, again ran into a full gale with low visibility and mountainous seas and decided to turn back.
On April 22, another British thrust toward the Skagerrak cost Beatty and Jellicoe even more heavily. The battle cruisers, steaming off the Danish coast, ran into a sudden bank of dense fog and Australia and New Zealand, zigzagging at 19 knots, collided and were badly damaged. Then the dreadnought Neptune collided with a neutral merchant ship and, later that night, three British destroyers ran into one another. On April 24, Jellicoe was back at Scapa Flow coaling his ships; at 4:00 that afternoon, he learned of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland and that the High Seas Fleet had put to sea. At dawn the next day, German battle cruisers were bombarding the English towns of Lowestoft and Yarmouth.
Before this happened, physical disability had temporarily removed from command the most active German North Sea admiral, Franz Hipper. As commander of the battle cruisers and other ships of the Scouting Groups and also as the officer responsible for the defense of the Heligoland Bight, Hipper was bending under the weight of his duties. Fatigue was compounded by sciatica. He had difficulty sleeping, and when he managed to doze off, every sound—a step on the deck above his cabin, the slapping of halyards in the wind—reawakened him. Hipper knew he needed a rest, but once Scheer had replaced Pohl, he decided not to ask for leave just as a new Commander-in-Chief was taking over. Two months later, on March 26, Hipper, feeling “terrible pain and exhaustion,” applied for sick leave. The following day, Scheer visited him on board Seydlitz and approved the request.
Before leaving Seydlitz, Hipper summoned Erich Raeder, his Chief of Staff, and described one of his worries about turning over the command to R
“You know I am very fond of music, I mean good and refined music,” Hipper began. “I’m particularly fond of Richard Wagner, particularly Lohengrin! Our band . . . is at the top of its form just now.”
“Indeed it is, Your Excellency. We will take the greatest care to see that it remains so—”
“I certainly hope so, for music is perhaps the best form of relaxation I get on board. What’s worrying me is that there might be a change for the worse during my absence—”
Hipper lapsed into silence. . . . After a time Raeder ventured: “Why should there be any change?”
Hipper jumped from his chair, strode up and down and blurted out: “Bödicker knows nothing about music. His taste runs to nothing but Prussian marches, treacly waltzes and bits out of Fledermaus. I’m sure he’ll end by mucking up my whole band—mucking it up, I tell you!”
. . . [But] he ended up by bursting out laughing. “After all, I’ll soon get them right again. I’ve often had to show them myself when the fiddles were going wrong!”
Hipper took a five-week cure at Bad Neundorf, then visited a nerve specialist who listened to his complaints, examined him carefully, and announced a complete absence of any damage to Hipper’s central nervous system. The admiral’s symptoms, the doctor declared, were caused by stress. Relieved, Hipper returned to his new flagship, the recently commissioned Lützow, on May 13 and resumed command.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Hipper, he had survived another kind of crisis. Scheer’s promotion to command had pleased him; he looked forward to the promise of more vigorous North Sea action. Nevertheless, when Hipper asked for sick leave, Scheer telephoned Holtzendorff and asked that Hipper be retired. Scheer felt that “Vice Admiral Hipper no longer possesses the qualities of robustness and elasticity which . . . [command of the Scouting Groups] demands and it is also his view that the end of the leave will not effect a complete restoration of his abilities.” Holtzendorff rejected the proposal because it seemed inappropriate for Scheer to be “coming forward with such radical suggestions so soon after his assumption of command.” Müller wrote on this memorandum, “I agree.” There is evidence that Scheer had a certain envy of Hipper’s fame and sometimes belittled him in service records, but the two men worked together for another two years—at which point Hipper succeeded Scheer as Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet and Scheer became Chief of the Naval Staff in Berlin.